Lord of the Night

He collapsed to the rusted floor with a wail, took one look at the throned giant looming over, and burst into tears.

'Sweet hive ghosts I didn't do anything don't kill me oh God-Emperor please...'

'Silence him,' Chia

'You are Slake?' Chia

'N... no! No! Not on my own!'

The scout punched him again, harder this time. 'Lies!' he roared. 'I heard his name!'

'Breggan,' Chia

The young scout backed away, breathing hard.

'You are Slake,' Chia

'N-no!' he wailed, tears and snot thick on his face. 'Not on my own! Oh sweet Terra, no! Y-you don't understand! Not on my own!'

Sahaal had heard enough. He was out of his throne and hunched over the man like a great lion, seemingly without movement, and the Shadowkin audience cried out and backed away, astonished at his speed.

The man stared up into the twisted visage of Sahaal's helm, and felt the tears freeze on his cheeks.

'...oh...'

'Four days ago,' Sahaal whispered, so quiet that none but the captive could hear his reed-thin voice, 'you purchased from the Glacier Rat scum Nikhae an item. You knew it was coming. You took it from him and paid him. Yes?'

In the face of such icy terror, the man's stammers were frozen away, leaving only a tight, strangled tone.

'Yes. I mean... I don't know. I have a small piece of the memory but—'

Sahaal pressed a claw against the wattles of his neck.

'Explain.'

'Slake! It's... not a person. Not one of us.' His eyes rolled, mouth quivering. 'It's a collective. A group, you see? The gestalim surgery... we took the implant! Separate us, we're just people. But together, all three joined...' He pawed his bound hands at the cables hanging from his skull, broken nails clattering against their sockets. 'Together we are Slake. Th-three people, one machina. We share memories. We share intellect! Alone we are nothing!'

Sahaal ground his teeth.

'You are servitors?'

'No! No, the servitor is a slave to the machina. Together, we control it.'

There had been servitors, even in Sahaal's time. Empty minded things: human bodies with machines for brains, controlled and governed by the chattering logic engines inside. Such contrivances left no room for personality or self awareness, rendering a servitor little more than a mobile tech-console. Their lives — such as they were — were a sequence of parameter and stimulus.

Could it be that these three nothings, these human fools with more avarice than sense, had found a way to retain their minds — their ambitions — yet to foster the cold intellect of a servitor nonetheless?

'How is this possible?' Sahaal rasped, bladed claw tight against the man's larynx.

'We paid! We chose it! We found... found a man who could do it!'

'And who,' Sahaal hissed, already guessing the answer, 'was that?'

'Pahvulti! His name is Pahvulti!'

The cognis logi. The information broker. The renegade tech-priest.

The bastard.

It was not a name welcome to Sahaal's ears.

He lifted the shrieking captive in one great claw, and carried him out into the shadows away from the tribe, to question him as only he could.

When he was done with the man, who was one piece but not the whole of Slake, Sahaal brought his head before the Shadowkin and held it high, blood snaking in long chords along his arm.

The man had known little, ultimately. Glimmers of memories, snatches of detail that fired recognition in his eyes but could draw nothing new from the fragments of his third of the Slake computer. It was as he said: alone, he was pifitful. A moronic child, a nothing, a nobody.

He could recall meetings. He could glimpse, in agonised flashes, the package that Sahaal sought so desperately.

'Was it open?' Sahaal had raged. 'Was it opened?'

But that detail was beyond him, as were any others, and the Night Lord had been quick to succumb to the fury that was building inside him with every day, the hungry voices whispering for blood in his mind.

Sahaal took the man's head and left the body to the waters of the swamp, where luminous tendrils dragged it down to the depths.

The scouts were redeployed to find the remaining pieces of the collective. The youngster who had captured the man went unthanked, chastised for his incomplete prize.

It was all Sahaal could do not to tear him to shreds.

Thus it was, with his blood boiling in his veins, his heart hammering in his ears, and the name ''Pahvulti'' spi

The savage grin on his face left them ashen with terror.

In a shack at the camp's edge — as sturdy and soundproofed a structure as the meagre building materials had allowed — he took delivery of the first hostage. The tribesmen dumped the moaning creature to the floor, faces twisted with disgust. He dismissed them and they left with relief, pausing only to spit at the blind worm on the floor.

Sahaal wondered vaguely how they might react if they knew the truth: that without such astropathic wretches as this their mighty Imperium was a doomed giant, without eyes or ears or mouth.

He stepped towards the figure — shivering and naked in the rustmud — and crooned with an eagerness that he could no longer contain. His rage would not be restrained.

'W-who's there?' the man quailed, withered features crumpling further. His wrists and ankles were bound with sharp cable and his eyes... his eyes had been taken from him long, long ago. The tortured flesh at their edges was puffy with unhealed scars and infection.

'You ca

'I... N-no! My visem dens... sweet Emperor... It's gone!'

Ah yes, Sahaal reflected. The second sight. Such men as this did not need eyes to see.

Usually.

'What have you done to me?' the voice grew loud, indignation at the theft of its greatest sense puncturing its fear. Sahaal allowed himself an indulgent smile.

'It is lead,' he said, bending to run fingers across the thick strip of bent metal, powder-white, coiled across his furrowed forehead like a circlet. Sahaal flicked it playfully. 'It is anathema to your... gifts, yes? You may no more penetrate it than a hawk may escape its hood.'

'Who are you?' The astopath's voice became a whisper, an awestruck quail that wrestled between curiosity and horror. 'How do you know so much about the gift? I... I am not afraid of you!'

Sahaal's smile broadened.

'I know the astropath's weakness, little man,' he said, 'because at one time an army of your brothers was at my disposal, through choice or not. And as for your fear...' He wet his lips, trembling, 'I think we both know you are lying.'

'The Emperor's faith is strong in my soul! I am without sin! Whatever your aims I shall n—'

'Do you know of Chaos?'

The man's mouth opened and closed, all his bluster stolen from him, a paroxysm of revulsion wracking him. 'I... You dare speak its name? Emperor preserve m—'

'You shall know of Chaos. You shall bathe in its fires, my friend. You shall know its voice.'

'Blasphemy! B-blasphemy!' The psyker tried to spit, to summon a gobbet of rebellious spittle on his flexing tongue, but Sahaal was faster. A single talon snickered from its secret sheath, blurred in the air, and was gone. The man spat out his own tongue on the crest of a shriek.